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Selectmen think budget in deciding road repairs

By Melissa Hanson, mhanson@lowellsun.com

Updated:
08/03/2016 10:23:32 AM EDT

LITTLETON -- Street improvements are on their way in town, as officials prepare to reconstruct two major roadways in the next three years, keeping the town's budget in mind when deciding which streets will make the cut.

StreetScan has identified the conditions of roads across town using sensor inspection technology, detecting which streets need the most work. The organization uses radar, optical and acoustic tools to detect defects on roadway surfaces, according to StreetScan.com. A truck equipped with cameras and a microphone near a rear wheel drives around town, collecting data on the conditions of the roadways, from cracks to potholes.

The product is a Geographic Information System map that uses color-coding to display the quality of the streets: green for good with varying shades down to red for poor and gray for streets that failed. StreetScan may suggest that towns seal cracks on some roads, while recommending complete reconstruction for others.

Selectmen reviewed Littleton's StreetScan data last week to choose which roads would undergo reconstruction in 2018 and 2019, deciding to go out of order of the StreetScan priority list so as not to break the town's budget.

The process has already started, with construction ongoing on New Estate Road at a cost of $2,925,665 and in design for Nagog Hill Road, which is expected to cost $3,382,273.

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Foster Street was first on the StreetScan priority list, and estimated to cost $528,863 for reconstruction, which selectmen agreed should be one of the two streets tackled in the next few years. New Estate Road and Nagog Hill Road were No. 2 and 3, consecutively.

"If you do them in precisely the order that StreetScan proposes, then the next one up is more than we can comfortably undertake without the debt service spiking," Town Administrator Keith Bergman said at the Monday meeting.

If the town picked another road instead of Harwood, it would fit more comfortably into the budget, according to information prepared by Assistant Town Administrator for Finance and Budget Bonnie Holston, Bergman said.

"Bonnie's projections are that that would cause some spiking in our debt-service cost that would not be easily flattened out," Bergman said. "So if we could substitute a smaller project, and as it happens Matawanakee (Trail) was half of that cost, we wouldn't experience the spike."

Matawanakee Trail was No. 10 on the StreetScan list, but at $970,015 for reconstruction, it comes in about half the cost of renovating Harwood Road.

Even more reason to tackle Matawanakee first, Bergman said, residents of the road in 1997 made an agreement with the Board of Selectmen to fund water-main replacement through betterment assessments if the town would later reconstruct the road.

Bergman said residents had come to the town within the last year or two, questioning when the road work would begin.

Considering the almost decade-old promise of a previous board, current selectmen voted unanimously to reconstruct Matawanakee sooner. If they went along with the StreetScan priority list, that road would not see any changes until 2024.

Reconstruction on Foster Street is slated for fiscal 2018 and on Matawanakee Trail in fiscal 2019.

StreetScan estimates it would cost $26,022,004 to restore all city-owned roads, including contingency and police costs, according to the presentation, which is available on the town website. Salar Shahini, data scientist and GIS developer with StreetScan, put the presentation together but did not attend the selectmen's meeting.

StreetScan services cost Littleton $35,000, and the street survey was conducted last fall, according to Jonathan Boyarsky, account manager. The company has worked with Haverhill, Newton, Chelsea, Amherst and Raymond, N.H., and has begun talking with Tewksbury to see if the service could be utilized there. The company is eyeing Lowell and other nearby communities for future services, Boyarsky said.

The cost of StreetScan varies based on the number of miles of roads in town and what data the town wants. The street data collected during the scan gives municipal officers an added sense of comfort when making plans for capital improvements, Boyarsky said.

"We really need to change the mindset about how often and how much we're spending on surveys," Boyarsky said. "There's a thousand different variables, and just looking at the roads is not enough."

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